"And I beheld, and heard the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice: Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth....[Apocalypse (Revelation) 8:13]

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Julian of Norwich: The Quiet Voice of Contemplation

Julian of Norwich: The Quiet Voice of Contemplation

By Danièle Cybulskie

When I first started studying the Middle Ages, I had been steeped in
the usual simplistic notions of medieval Christianity, believing that
there was one form of spiritual practice that varied only slightly; that
men were the only ones permitted to think deeply about and guide
people’s faith; that people experienced their faith mainly through fear
and awe, especially in terms of the terrible torments of hell that
awaited sinners. One day, I came across The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, and all my simple ideas of medieval spirituality went out the window.

An anchoress, enclosed in her cell.

Julian of Norwich was a woman who lived in the latter half of the
fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, a chronological contemporary
of Chaucer and Henry IV. While deathly ill, Julian experienced a series
of visions or “showings” in which she interacted with Jesus and
witnessed some of his suffering on Earth. After she recovered her
health, she spent the rest of her life meditating on her visions, and
working through what they said about divine love. Eventually, at around
the age of fifty, Julian chose to devote her remaining days solely to
the contemplation of faith: she became an anchoress, enclosing herself
permanently in a cell attached to the outside of St. Julian’s church in
Norwich. There she stayed for twenty years, enclosed and yet a
well-known figure in the community, writing and giving spiritual comfort
to those who would visit her window.

One might expect that the near-death experiences of a medieval woman
as described while enclosed in a stone cell on the side of a church
would make them so foreign to a modern person as to be nearly useless; a
curiosity, but not much more. Julian’s writing, though, is so alive and
moving that it speaks across the centuries, reassuring and comforting,
confident and self-assured. Her words are not the words of one who
thunders from a pulpit; they are the words of one who takes your hand in
your darkest moment and speaks of forgiveness and compassion. It’s no
surprise that Julian’s most famous words, spoken to her by Jesus in one
of her visions, are in this vein: “al shal be wel, and al shal be wel,
and al manner of thing shal be wele” (ll. 938-940). Julian did not
condone sin – far from it – but she firmly and fundamentally believed
that all could and would be forgiven if only people would ask. Like a
mother’s love, Julian believed, God’s love transcended mortal mistakes.

What I love about Julian’s writing is its simplicity, born (I think)
of her long-term contemplation. Each chapter of her book is the
distillation of decades of thought, pared down into a form that hides
the complex thinking behind it. She uses familiar, everyday examples to
explain her faith, referring to God’s love, in one example, as “oure
clotheing, that for love wrappeth us” (l.146), “For as the body is
cladde in the cloth, and the flesh in the skyne, and the bonys in the
flesh, and the herte in the bouke, so arn we, soule and body, cladde in
the goodnes of God and inclosyd” (ll.210-213). God is not to be simply
feared, to Julian’s mind, but to be welcomed and accepted. Sin is also
to be accepted as part of God’s plan, for if God has made everything as
he wishes it, “How should anything be amysse?” (l.470).

If you’ve come across Julian in the news this month, it’s most likely
because TV presenter and historian Dr. Janina Ramirez has just
published a helpful and friendly new book on Julian which describes her
life and explains her teachings in their historical context: Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History.
While Julian’s writing is remarkable all on its own, you can really get
a sense of how she may have been shaped by her circumstances (i.e. the
Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the ascent of Henry IV) when you
look at the bigger picture that Ramirez paints. She discusses how
Julian’s approach to faith is strikingly different from, and yet similar
to, the writings of other theologians at the time, though (as Ramirez
points out) Julian herself would have never considered herself one by
any stretch. She recounts the story of Julian’s meeting with the much
more public mystic Margery Kempe
– one which I have always thought I desperately would have liked to
overhear for myself – and how the two women’s experiences compared.
Ramirez also speaks to how Julian’s shewings have been received
over time, and how they speak to the faithful, or simply the curious,
today. In short, Ramirez supplies a lot of the historical details that
Julian shies away from.Ramirez’ book
is a great, very readable introduction to Julian that gets at the heart
of why her writing is both inspirational to many (both Christian and
non-Christian) and historically fascinating. If you’d like to know more
about Julian (or anchoresses, or medieval Christianity) I’d definitely
recommend that you start there. If your Middle English is pretty good,
you can then go straight to The Shewings of Julian of Norwich (the TEAMS edition
is great) and dive in. However you encounter Julian, whether for the
first time or the hundredth, no doubt you will hear the quiet voice of a
lifetime of contemplation, as rich and real as it was hundreds of years
ago.

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St. Bernard:

Go forth confidently then, you knights, and repel the foes of the cross of Christ with a stalwart heart. Know that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, and in every peril repeat, "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." What a glory to return in victory from such a battle! How blessed to die there as a martyr! Rejoice, brave athlete, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but glory and exult even more if you die and join your Lord. Life indeed is a fruitful thing and victory is glorious, but a holy death is more important than either. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more are they who die for the Lord!

How secure, I say, is life when death is anticipated without fear; or rather when it is desired with feeling and embraced with reverence! How holy and secure this knighthood and how entirely free of the double risk run by those men who fight not for Christ! Whenever you go forth, O worldly warrior, you must fear lest the bodily death of your foe should mean your own spiritual death, or lest perhaps your body and soul together should be slain by him.

Indeed, danger or victory for a Christian depends on the dispositions of his heart and not on the fortunes of war. If he fights for a good reason, the issue of his fight can never be evil; and likewise the results can never be considered good if the reason were evil and the intentions perverse. If you happen to be killed while you are seeking only to kill another, you die a murderer. If you succeed, and by your will to overcome and to conquer you perchance kill a man, you live a murderer. Now it will not do to be a murderer, living or dead, victorious or vanquished. What an unhappy victory--to have conquered a man while yielding to vice, and to indulge in an empty glory at his fall when wrath and pride have gotten the better of you!

But what of those who kill neither in the heat of revenge nor in the swelling of pride, but simply in order to save themselves? Even this sort of victory I would not call good, since bodily death is really a lesser evil than spiritual death. The soul need not die when the body does. No, it is the soul which sins that shall die.

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port.

Once he finds himself in the thick of battle, this knight sets aside his previous gentleness, as if to say, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord; am I not disgusted with your enemies?" These men at once fall violently upon the foe, regarding them as so many sheep. No matter how outnumbered they are, they never regard these as fierce barbarians or as awe-inspiring hordes. Nor do they presume on their own strength, but trust in the Lord of armies to grant them the victory.

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Saint Athanasius

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith?The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ..."You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day. "Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ."